LinkedIn, with over 225 million members, is THE place to find, meet and stay connected with professional colleagues. It is also an excellent platform for establishing your expertise, to gain insights on your network connections and your competition, to find a job or job candidates and most importantly, to find leads. While you can easily sign up for LinkedIn and use it's functionality with a basic profile including only your name, I highly recommend taking full advantage of the site by creating a full profile. Not only will this help people find YOU when they are searching for the products or services you provide but when you reach out to link to people, they will find enough information to decide to link and work with you.

Remember, even if YOU are not using LinkedIn regularly, many of those 225 million professionals ARE, so be sure to have a full professional profile ready for when you come up in a search!

When creating a LinkedIn Profile, people often think of it as a digital resume but it can be SO much more. Here are some tips on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile.